Writing from/About Exile: Joanna Russ's Utopia The Female Man
Writing From/About the Exile: Joanna Russ’s Utopia The Female Man
" Culture is male. This does not mean that every man in Western or Eastern) society can do exactly as he pleases, or that every man creates the culture solus, or that every man is luckier than every woman. What it does mean…is that the society we live in is a patriarchy. And patriarchies imagine or picture themselves from the male point of view. There is a female culture, but it is an underground, unofficial, minor culture, occupying a small corner of what we think of officially as possible human experience. Both men and women in our culture conceive the culture from a single point of view—the male."
{Joanna Russ, What can a Heroine do? Or Why Women can't Write " in To write Like a Woman, p 80, 81
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" Our literature is not about women. It is not about men and women equally. It is by and about men." {81}
In her feminist science fiction novel The Female Man (1975), Joanna Russ, the American feminist science fiction writer, manifests the role of the intellectual in enlightening the society with women's emotional and intellectual exile. As the novel focuses on four women—they are actually the same woman in four alternate worlds—and their individual sufferings in dealing with men, Joanna the university professor is the one that writes their story, presents it to the world and creates the fictional possibility of a female utopia. Utopia simply means the good place that does not yet exist. Whileaway, the utopist earth of centuries to come, does not yet exist nor does Janet the utopist who is a woman raised in complete ignorance of gender stereotypes that hinder the natural and complete growth of women in most other human societies. To imagine such a place and woman is to have a greatly creative and subversive experience. Whileaway as portrayed in The Female Man is Russ's private thought-experiment to examine the incomplete lives of women, their real, psychological and literary exile. The 'what-if'
" Culture is male. This does not mean that every man in Western or Eastern) society can do exactly as he pleases, or that every man creates the culture solus, or that every man is luckier than every woman. What it does mean…is that the society we live in is a patriarchy. And patriarchies imagine or picture themselves from the male point of view. There is a female culture, but it is an underground, unofficial, minor culture, occupying a small corner of what we think of officially as possible human experience. Both men and women in our culture conceive the culture from a single point of view—the male."
{Joanna Russ, What can a Heroine do? Or Why Women can't Write " in To write Like a Woman, p 80, 81
}
" Our literature is not about women. It is not about men and women equally. It is by and about men." {81}
In her feminist science fiction novel The Female Man (1975), Joanna Russ, the American feminist science fiction writer, manifests the role of the intellectual in enlightening the society with women's emotional and intellectual exile. As the novel focuses on four women—they are actually the same woman in four alternate worlds—and their individual sufferings in dealing with men, Joanna the university professor is the one that writes their story, presents it to the world and creates the fictional possibility of a female utopia. Utopia simply means the good place that does not yet exist. Whileaway, the utopist earth of centuries to come, does not yet exist nor does Janet the utopist who is a woman raised in complete ignorance of gender stereotypes that hinder the natural and complete growth of women in most other human societies. To imagine such a place and woman is to have a greatly creative and subversive experience. Whileaway as portrayed in The Female Man is Russ's private thought-experiment to examine the incomplete lives of women, their real, psychological and literary exile. The 'what-if'